My ancestors told stories of Black folks who could fly.

Black folks who would be freed of bondage and all things that shackled them to this earth.

They would tell stories of a promised land ripe with victory and built upon hope.

They would dream of distant futures; Afrofutures

- Quincy

THE AFROFUTURE IS NOW

by Quincy Bowie Jr.

As Black and Queer history is actively being erased, meet the creatives preserving the past and forging their own Afrofuture:

JayLoni Fisher

JayLoni Fisher

Courtesy of Rolly Felix

Multidisciplinary Creative and Artist

JayLoni Fisher is a senior studying Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California. Hailing from South Central, he's a multidisciplinary creative, musician and Afrofuturist. I started our interview by simply asking JayLoni how he was feeling. We sat across from each other in the common area of an empty building at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. It was about 9:30 pm and he had joined me after leaving a meeting. I was sitting on the floor when he elected to join and responded:

“Even though spiritually I feel very energized and like I can keep going…my body has limitations.”

A purple flower rests in his fro as we talk under the warm lighting and high ceilings making everything he was saying warm and resonant, even the things he seemed to be wrestling with.

“When did you know you were meant to make art, or rather when did you start,” I asked him. He took a breath and started to answer before stopping.

“Hmm, I'm trying to meditate on this and give you a genuine answer,” he said with another breath. “I started at a really, really young age…I feel like something that really grounded me early on was music,” he said. He shared early memories of his mother singing and of those cutesy elementary school musical performances that remain with him still.

“Something that really grounded me early on was music.”

— JayLoni Fisher

“The emotional response that music elicited from me definitely was something I was curious about at a young age. I think that was a big part of me, like maturing or, you know, maturing at a at a young age, just like there were feelings I didn't really know how to process and how to communicate,” he said.

For many, though not all Afrofuturists, there is a point of departure where the question of tangibility becomes an issue. “I feel like there's a shared, like longing or yearning for something greater than the present moment that is shared amongst Afrofuturism. But maybe the approaches to getting there. It's kind of different,” he said. “I think there's sort of a spectrum from like fantastical Afrofuturism [to] more mundane Afrofuturism is the way I understand it.”

artwork by Quincy Bowie Jr.

Today Afrofuturism is a nuanced and complex concept. It can be understood to exist as a cultural belief, aesthetic, and artistic philosophy that imagines Black liberated life at the intersection of science, technology and (sometimes) spirituality.

Part of the beauty is that Afrofuturism is a fluid concept, there are at least as many interpretations as there are Black folks. Writer and critic Mark Dery coined the phrase “Afrofuturism” in a 1993 essay titled "Black to the Future.” He explored the works of Black science and speculative fiction writers and articulated a throughline. Now over 30 years later, Afrofuturism has only continued to expand.

The Afrofuturists of today are fighting on multiple fronts. Black and Queer history is being censured, rights that were once considered enshrined have been dismantled, and many marginalized communities live in fear of a very uncertain future.

In the U.S. the increasingly dismal outlook of the economic future is pushing citizens to new levels of anxiety and stress. It is in times such as these that the work of Afrofuturists is even more essential. This nebulous and abstract concept is a beacon of hope, a call to all those who would dare to imagine a future beyond our present.

Jheanelle Brown

Portrait of Jheanelle Brown

Courtesty of California Institute of Arts

Curator and Arts Worker

Brown has spent her career exploring the boundlessness of Black identity. At the start of our conversation, she breathed deeply:

“The world is definitely terrible right now…I think that's an understatement,” she said. She told me she was feeling confused and stuck, unsure about what exactly we were meant to be doing in the face of so many problems.

Brown works in many different capacities as a curator and creative. She's on the faculty at CalArts, is a film programmer at the Los Angeles Film Forum, and has curated exhibits shown in the California African American Museum. She came to Los Angeles for graduate school by way of D.C. where her interests in film and curation were stoked.

"Premium Connect" Tabita Rezaire

"Relic 0" Larry Achiampong

"The Black Man in the Cosmos" Kitoko Davis

"1968 < 2018 > 2068" Keisha Rae Witherspoon

Stills from 18th Street Arts Virtual Gala curated by Jheanelle Brown

While she was an undergraduate, she thought she was going to be a diplomat, but an encounter with filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion changed her trajectory Brown said.

After moving to L.A. she eventually connected with Ben Caldwell, a renowned filmmaker with ties to the L.A. Rebellion film movement, and co-created an exhibition of his work in the California African American Museum. This exhibit and all of her work is an extension of her politics she told me.

“I have a leftist philosophical and political framework and, you know, through that, Blackness and through that world labor. All these things are things that I'm always interested in exploring,” she said.

Brown applies Afrofuturism in service of her core philosophy, though embodying this belief may not always be easy or clear she said.

“I'm very transparent about my relationship to an institution or space, transparent about the questions I have,” she said. As she's working through the problematics of institutions and carving out a way to create that also aligns with her ethics, Brown thinks Afrofuturism can be helpful.

“Afrofuturism when intentionally constructed or intentionally deconstructed is useful. A generative Afrofuturism is one that is not divorced from history and the past and our present material concerns.”

With respect to the many problems of the world and how we combat and correct them, Brown said Afrofuturism also reveals a way forward. “There are really soul-affirming examples, artistic examples, and also organizing and activist examples that we can put under the Afrofuturist umbrella that are ways to think,”she said. “It's definitely a way to work through these things.”

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The Afrofuturism I have come to know is something that exists outside of linear time. To imagine a new future, to echo the words of Jheanelle Brown, a generative Afrofuturism must not be divorced from our past. Across the African diaspora, we are taught to respect our elders and the wisdom they hold. Once they leave this physical world our relationship with the elders shifts. They become a part of us, and through us, they live and are remembered.

Jessi Ujazi

Portrait of Jessi Ujazi

Courtesy of Jessi Ujazi

Visual Artist

This remembrance is key to the imaginative worlds of Jessi Ujazi, a collage artist, painter and creative director. Ujazi hails from the Deep South, raised in the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and with roots in Mississippi; about 45mins outside of where Emmett Till was murdered.

“I've always had a consciousness, I'm directly connected to the narrative of Black history in America and the world. Even just having a local awareness, it expanded into a global awareness,” Ujazi said.

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"AfroBlanco by Jessi Ujazi
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"Venus Rising" by Jessi Ujazi
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"AfrImagination" by Jessi Ujazi
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"In Over My Head" by Jessi Ujazi

Long before creating her viral AfroTarot card deck, Ujazi was developing her distinct visual language. She learned the basics of Photoshop and would make fliers, mixtape covers, and more throughout high school when she realized it was something she could take seriously.

“When I was in college, one of our projects in my photography class was…to find an old picture and bring it in and scan and retouch it. My grandma had given me like, a collection of the photos that she had, and these were really old photos," she said.

The photos weren't just old, they were also water-damaged. As she began to retouch them, she noticed something interesting.

“I was realizing that some of my ancestors who were no longer living look exactly like some of my living ancestors. Like there was a photo of my grandfather's grandmother, and she looked exactly like my aunt. And so I restored those photos. And then I put them together to show like, that resemblance," she said.

It was this moment, where the connection between the past and the future became personal that Afrofuturism clicked for her she told me.

“Then it just turned into like, I want to know all my ancestors,” she said.

Ujazi's relationship with Afrofuturism has only deepened since this project. Today, she's employing new language to describe her work. Afro-omniscience is the term she's coined to emphasize the unique temporal space she accessess in her work.

Even in this effort to expand Afrofuturism, questions of praxis remain. Ujazi acknowledged that for some, Afrofuturism may seem like an escape, but to her it's therapy.

“Just because we want to see Black people in space doesn't mean that we forgot about our rural Black people,” she said. “People feel like Afrofuturism kind of conflicts with the idea that Black people belong here on Earth…but it's therapeutic to think of outside of the box and to actually enter into an imaginative space, completely separate from reality.”

While she enjoys entering the imaginative space, Ujazi also said she's easily discouraged. When creating the AfroTarot, she told me, she had to move with conviction. Ujazi grew up Southern Baptist, but in a household where knowledge about other religions and forms of spirituality were respected, she said. As she got into tarot, she began to notice that aspects of the cards she encountered felt African.

As she dug deeper into tarot she struggled to connect with many of the decks, and so decided to make her own and share the process on social media.

Her project was quickly met with a flood of support and just like that the AfroTarot Deck was born.

I met Jessi one early Saturday morning at the Hilltop Cafe in Downtown Los Angeles. I was running behind and rushed in, scanning the cafe for her face. I looked to my right, and our eyes met and she smiled softly at me. I walked to the table, took a seat and we started chatting.

Ujazi told me that her deck is very much a traditional tarot deck, just with African faces and symbology. Though her deck may be rooted in a traditional approach, Ujazi's relationship with tarot is less about discerning the future and more about preparing for it.

“It's not necessarily going to tell me what's going to happen in the future, but it'll give me guidance on how to shape my perspective about what I'm experiencing,” she said. “I don't necessarily look to it for answers, but more so [for] ideas.”

Then it was time for my tarot reading.

She pulled out a small box and opened it to reveal a small golden bag. She opened it and pulled out her deck before extending it to me.

“If I'm doing a reading for someone, I like for them to pull the cards for themselves. So that your energy is also transferred into the cards,” she said.

She fanned the cards out before me and asked me to pick three:

"This card appears at a time when you may be attached to material things or maybe your sense of security is leaning more into financial and material stability. It calls for you to think less materialistically and kind of get out of a scarcity mindset and know that you are provided for." - Jessi Ujazi
Card 1
Card 2
"This is a Major Arcana card, so it speaks to a major theme in your life. As you can see, he's a keeper of knowledge. He's holding a sacred text. The Hierophant appears at a time when you really need to rest on your values and your beliefs, and maybe also explore or deepen your understanding of the things that you've been studying and practicing." - Jessi Ujazi
"This is a great card. As you can see, they're celebrating under a rainbow and these cups are overflowing. The cups speak to your emotions...how you are handling your emotions, how they're either flowing or not flowing in your life. The Ten of Cups is about an outpour, a celebration. It's about completion, being number ten, and this also celebrates or is calling for you to count your blessings and celebrate yourself even when it's not necessarily a big event, because every day of your life is a big event." - Jessi Ujazi
Card 3

Her distinctive artistic and visual language emphasizes granting space, language and form to unarticulated concepts. Her willingness to push beyond what we already know and to say what others leave unsaid is an extension of her identities as a Black and Queer person she told me.

“Being Queer inherently we have a wider perspective…you feel differently, you express yourself differently,” she said. “I feel like my understanding of Afrofuturism is enriched by both of those aspects of myself.”

In light of recent targeted attacks on the Black and Queer communities, Ujazi uses her art, platform and way of being to provide light for others like her. More than just a choice, she feels obligated to do so.

“As a revolutionary and a Black optimist, artistically, I feel like times of conflict are the most opportune times,” she said. “We create conceptual landmarks and benchmarks for historical events…the artist is kind of like the soundboard for the voices of the community.”

She acknowledged how easy it can be for those who belong to these communities to feel perpetually negative, but doubled down on her belief in optimism.

“There is so much negativity that's already being pushed in our direction that I just refuse to be amplifying that energy. I don't care how dark it is. I will be optimistic about it. I will always see the other side of wherever I am.”

I left Hilltop that day feeling grounded and inspired, but also deeply curious about what other manifestations of Afrofuturism there might be.

I wanted to know: Where does Afrofuturism live?

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